The Newcastle Poetry Prize is one of Australia’s oldest and most lucrative, having been around (albeit in its original incarnation as the Mattara Poetry Prize) since the 1980s. It is seen as a prize with the potential to discover new voices. Entries are submitted anonymously, and the competition is for single poems, rather than books. The judges for 2007 were Martin Harrison, John Jenkins, and Jan Owen, all established poets themselves.

The winning poem is Mark Tredinnick’s ‘Eclogues’, a term that aptly encompasses the rural setting of the wetlands around the Wingecarribee river in New South Wales’s southern highlands. Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender (1579) consisted of twelve eclogues, one for every month of the year. Tredinnick’s twenty-one could well be a reference to the conundrums of the twenty-first century that the poem bravely tries to reconcile: a bourgeois-rural existence, a personal relation to the land, our relation to the land, individual responsibility and the contemporary state and function of poetry.

In a Virgilian tone, such a task could well have sunk into bathos, but Tredinnick is, for the most part, successful in avoiding pretension and pedagogy by walking the difficult line between the lofty and the local, the metaphysical and the mundane. The tone is conversational and grounded, partly because Tredinnick’s pastoral is informed by more than the laurels and myrtles, satyrs and nymphs of the European mode; it also encompasses something of the understatement of Zen and Taoist philosophy. These disparate inspirations are transposed into a relaxed Australian voice, but one that is deadly serious.

At its heart, the poem is elegiac, lamenting the death of a friend, and another’s sickness with cancer, but as in the traditional pastoral form, the poet finds consolation in rebirth, in young family life (‘I find it in the bath, my girl / and our three children, sleek as seals’); in the cyclical nature of life (‘our works are our children. They carry us on’); and in the continuity of the land itself (‘Landscape is another way, a practice longer than love and death’).

Barry Hill’s ‘Desert Calligraphies’ is similarly self-consciously concerned with the limitations of art in its different forms, especially painting and poetry. It centres on a trip to Victoria’s north-east Mallee district with the painter John Wolesley. Hill’s poem is filled with admiration for the painter; and of his ability to connect his art with the land. An image of desert rain mixing with paint on canvas is a beautiful one, capturing as it does the literal connection between painting and place. Hill shows a kind of envy at being able to leave a canvas out in the open overnight, at the mercy of the elements. But at the same time, he is demonstrating poetry’s ability to both narrate this experience as well as explore the power of Wolesley’s paintings.

Andrew Slattery’s highly commended poem, ‘The Bell and the Roar’, winner of the local section, is both fond and fearful of farm life. It recalls the trauma of the dramatic death of a cow in a river. Again the pastoral setting lends itself to allegory, and the mythopoeic; it is a kind of coming-of-age narrative. ‘I will never undo this place that has yarned / and gisted my body. Bells call the living / to assemble; bells call the dead to disperse.’ While the farm boy has gone on to become a city man, he knows he will return to ‘book-end / a life’: ‘How long will I last in the city? / The city hall clock bells every hour.’

I do worry that the choice of winning poems weighs in on a greater ideological debate – is it the Australian ‘Poetry Wars’? – about the authenticity of the rural versus the suburban voice, perhaps along Murray and Tranter lines. There is something seductive, romantic, about all this landscape, but is it artificially privileged over the more common domestic, suburban voice? Just the names of some of the other poets included show that the pastoral is prominent: Brendan Ryan, John Kinsella. Of course, this is a prize from what was once a very rural town, and the entries themselves may well have reflected it. And there are a number of poems that are truly (sub)urban in their scope, such as Carol Jenkins’ ‘Shirt / Post Shirt’, set around a Hills Hoist.

One final reservation is about the broader appeal of an anthology of prize entries. As an annual anthology of Australian poetry this book must compete with Black Inc.’s Best Australian Poems and UQP’s Best Australian Poetry anthologies, which market themselves to the general reader with more directness. Or perhaps this is exactly what poetry prizes need – a book form that the general reader can find on the shelf. It is certainly an engaging read.

An interesting addition is a multimedia CD-ROM, containing the shortlist for the new media prize, in the form of interactive flash media projects that blend poetry with atmospheric imagery and soundscapes.